Mary E. Rolling Reading Series to feature novelist, screenwriter Alissa Nutting

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Novelist and screenwriter Alissa Nutting will offer a reading as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 14. While the virtual event is open to the public, anyone interested in attending must register in advance via Zoom.

Nutting is the author of the novels “Tampa” and “Made for Love” (a New York Times editor’s choice selection), as well as the story collection “Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls,” which won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications such as Tin House, BOMB, Elle, Real Simple, BuzzFeed, and many others. She is currently an assistant professor of English and writer-in-residence at Grinnell College in Iowa.

Fellow authors have called Nutting “one of the most daring writers in America” and described her writing as “blisteringly smart, feverishly inventive, darkly comic and surreal.” Booklist characterized “Made for Love” as being “a sly satire of our tech- and prosperity-obsessed society.” An HBOMax television series based on “Made for Love,” co-written and produced by Nutting, premiered in April 2021 and has been labeled a “must watch” by many critics.

Nutting’s newest project — an Adult Swim cartoon entitled “Teenage Euthanasia” about a partially undead family that owns a Florida funeral home — was recently featured on Time Magazine’s list of five best new television shows for September 2021.

The Mary E. Rolling Reading Series is a program offered by Penn State’s Creative Writing Program in English. The series receives generous support from the College of the Liberal Arts; the Department of English; the Joseph L. Grucci Poetry Endowment; the Mary E. Rolling Lectureship in Creative Writing; and University Libraries. A full list of readings in the 2021-22 series, as well as links to livestreams and virtual events, can be found at the series' website.